Cipher, The

Nicholas is a directionless would-be poet with a job at a video store. His lover Nakota, volatile and never quite his partner, takes him down the hall to a storage room to show him what she has found there: a black hole with no bottom.

Nakota names it the Funhole and begins dropping things into it to watch what follows. A jar of insects comes out fused into a new thing. A mouse returns wrong. A severed hand twitches back to life. She treats it as an experiment, and each test pushes further than the last.

The hole leaves its mark on Nicholas instead of Nakota. A weeping wound opens in his palm and will not heal, and it ties him to the thing in the storage room in ways he cannot explain. Obsession and jealousy sharpen between the two lovers as the hole draws in everyone around it.

This is horror in a cramped, airless register, with body horror at its centre and a sense of cosmic dread behind it. The book won a Bram Stoker Award. It follows a slow physical and emotional corruption, and the mood is bleak and unsettling from the first visit to the storage room.